Saturday morning we ran a Libya vs US Navy air war scenario, based on an amped-up version of the real Gulf of Libya incidents in the mid-1980s. The Libyan MiGs humiliated the US Navy Tomcats, shooting down two and barely losing any aircraft, while blowing up the oil tanker they had come to strike!

I didn’t play in this one, but it certainly caught my eye. Rival teams of Ghostbusters (they’ve become a franchise, apparently) try to clear a haunted subway station. This was one of Lisa’s games, she always runs awesome creative games that are very welcoming to gamers of all ages!

Another 1980s based scenario for Saturday evening, this time using Martin’s awesome 6mm hex terrain to do a complex West German vs Soviet scenario. Soviet air-landing battalion vs West German home guard, then a counterattack by West German armour that runs into a spearhead group of Soviet armour coming to relieve their paratroopers! Great game and a decisive Soviet victory.

Sunday I ran a big Pulp Alley game for six players. It was somewhere in India after the Great War, and we had rival teams of Thugee cultists (the cult wasn’t as extinct as everyone thought…), various interfering foreigners including White Russians and Red Air Pirates, and two rival British Army Lieutenants each out to prove themselves the best! It all ended in a giant brawl in the collapsing cursed temple of Kali, with the Thugee generally being seen as the winners!

As always, a great time in Vancouver. It was good to see most of the regulars there and catch up with them, and see all the great games being put on. Until next year!

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Yet another post of short links, news, random bits, and oddments that wouldn’t warrant a full post.

Laser-cut MDF for early motor vehicles? They look pretty good, actually, and they’re 1/3 the price of resin & pewter vehicles. I might have to make an order to Warbases sometime to expand my pulp/RCW/WW1 vehicle fleet some more!

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Via the US Library of Congress, this fantastic simple British recruiting poster from 1915.

…To Delay Is Dangerous…

Really fantastic handdrawn typography and an eye for proportions. A classic of the type.

The whole Library of Congress WW1 Poster Collection is fantastic and well worth a browse. WW1 and post-WW1 posters from all over the world, not just the English-speaking world. Even better, copyright has long expired on almost all of these items across most of the world, so you can re-use them for your own purposes if you like.

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A month between posts… I managed more updates that that from a hotel room in far northern Alberta while working 70 hour weeks!

I have been doing modelling and gaming stuff, honest! We had a great game of Mud & Blood-powered Russian Civil War action a couple weeks ago, I’ve had a number of good Blood Bowl games and I’ve got some good projects underway, but since getting back to civilization as I usually understand it I basically haven’t touched the blog.

So what have I been doing?

The two 28mm lasercut brick buildings I bought from Impudent Mortal are ticking along, just the roofs to finish. I promised a proper review post for them and it’s coming, really!

My first 15mm science fiction order in about a decade (!) came in from Ground Zero Games. Very, very nice powered armour infantry, some drones, and a few other bits and pieces. They’re cleaned, assembled and primed and will be the next project on the table after the buildings and goblins are done.

Goblins? What? I’ve got an order of Reaper’s very useful and inexpensive Bones plastic figures in, and am converting a bunch of them for Blood Bowl, principally to start a Goblin team for BB. Just so this post isn’t entirely apologetic verbiage, here’s a closeup snap of a couple of the Bones figures in progress!

Trolls & Minotaurs! Various Reaper Bones figures being converted for Blood Bowl, and the usual clutter of other stuff in the background. Click for larger.

The unpainted white troll on the left is the most extensive conversion so far. It’s a Marsh Troll with his club cut off, both arms cut and re-posed, and one leg cut and pulled in to move his feet closer together. He’s on a 40mm base with his toes hanging over both sides, and that’s really as large a base as I want on a BB pitch. Greenstuff shoulder armour disguises the re-posing surgery scars, and since this photo he’s gotten a couple of straps across his chest and some other details here and there.

The orange troll is a Cave Troll. He comes empty handed so his only conversions so far is some elbow and shoulder pads and a cut-down base. 30mm slotta base under him.

The black minotaur isn’t currently slated to join any specific team; I’ll use him as a Star Player proxy for now. Simple conversion, just weapon snips from each hand and a cut-down base.

There’s ten goblin linemen (line-gobs?) on the right, all from either the Bones Pathfinder Warriors or Pathfinder Pyros sets. I also ordered several of the Pathfinder Goblin Warchanter figures for converting but haven’t started on them yet. The line-gobs are all simple conversions, mostly weapon snips and cutting the bases down. Here and there I cut and re-glued an arm or hand, and I cut a few details off some figures to prevent having exact duplicates on the pitch, nicked a few ears, that sort of thing.

The Bones material is really easy to work with, it cuts cleanly and bonds wonderfully with superglue. It can’t really be sanded or filed, though, which makes getting rid of moulding lines and details a bit of a pain sometimes. Still, for the silly cheap prices it can’t be beat, especially if you’re looking for fodder for conversion projects like Blood Bowl teams!

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Not a roleplaying book, although it sounds like it, and an RPG set in Danzig could be pretty cool, actually, now that I think about it, but the Free City Sourcebook is just-launched site collecting primary source material on that very odd interwar phenomenon, the Free City of Danzig.

Created by the various post-war treaties and governed by League of Nations mandate, the basic theory behind the Free City of Danzig (which is now the Polish city of Gdansk, and the site where the first shots of World War Two were fired) was that because neither Germany nor Poland would let the other rule this important port city on the Baltic, neither of them would. Like most compromises this pleased neither side at all and was constantly undercut by both the German and Polish governments (and by the general weakness of the League of Nations), but the basic theory had some sense behind it.

I haven’t looked at the Free City Sourcebook in massive detail, but there’s a good basic timeline and it looks like an increasing number of links to primary sources, some through things like Google News, some on other third party sites and a number hosted right on the Sourcebook’s own site. It’s always nice to find more people who don’t treat the Interwar Period as some oddball interruption to the two World Wars but as a proper, strange and fascinating historical period in it’s own right. I’ll be following the Sourcebook’s progress with great interest!

(hat tip to the always-fascinating Metafilter, which had a short article on the Free City Sourcebook a few days ago.)

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Back in late January, two of the gamers of our group put together a 28mm Napoleonic “Retreat from Moscow” game that was a blast – everyone had a small group of French officers and soldiers, all the main officers had personal side missions or special motivations they could do for extra VP, and the GM ran all the Russian forces.

Pretty much every Frenchman died by the end of the game, mostly run down by the pursuing Russian light horse, often after being distracted by their side mission or after attempting clever things like cutting through the forest instead of just following the road. Oh, and at least one was bashed over the head by an angry Russian peasant!

I contributed my nominally-Russian Civil War buildings to the game; the rest of the figures are from the collections of the two guys who ran it, and the base rules were GW’s out of print Legends of the Old West (LotOW) which are a good, flexible, sane set of blackpowder skirmish/light RPG rules that work well with small parties of figures.

The four photos I took are all up on Flickr; click on any of these photos to see the full-size version over there.

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Here’s a nice Christmas present for those of us interested in the Russian Civil War, the Great War and related events: siberianexpedition.ca is a huge digital archive of photographs and other material related to the little-known Western intervention in the Russian Civil War, specifically the 4200 Canadian troops sent to Vladivostok after the RCW kicked off.

There’s over 2000 photographs (although some are duplicates) and it’s all fully searchable in English, French and Russian. Some of the photos are actually modern photos from Siberia of some of the locations depicted in the original 1918/1919 images, which is kind of cool. There’s also a brief history of how exactly a bunch of Canadians who’d volunteered to fight in Europe wound up in Vladivostok and Siberia, and some learning materials for teachers at different levels.

This isn’t a completely new site (started in 2012, it looks like) so it’ll be interesting to see how it develops — it looks like they’re trying to do some map-based stuff and a few other developments. Further bonus for me, there’s a local angle here as most of the Canadian Siberian expedition left by ship from Victoria, and it’s our local University of Victoria who are behind this site.

I’ll be mining the photos and other materials on here for inspiration for RCW scenery and such for a long while!

In the meantime, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and such to all readers!